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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
World
Josh Luckhurst

Doomsday Clock AI predicts what looming apocalypse would look like

A creepy AI has predicted what the apocalypse would look like after scientists recalibrated the Doomsday Clock to the closest the world has ever been to disaster.

The clock was first unveiled by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 as a means to represent the imminent threat of man-made global catastrophe.

The nonprofit media organisation made up of world leaders and Nobel laureates use the clock as a metaphor and reminder "of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet."

It ticks forwards and backwards according to the global threat level, with the clock moving for the first time in three years to 90 seconds to 'midnight' earlier today.

The Doomsday Clock was set to 90 seconds to 'midnight' - the closest the world has ever been to ending humanity (Patrick Semansky/AP/REX/Shutterstock)

In 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the clock to 100 second to 'midnight', which was the closest the world has ever been to ending humanity. The so-called safest the world has been, according to the clock, was in 1991 when it stood at 17 minutes to midnight.

As a result of the scientists predictions, The Sun asked DALL·E 2, a new AI system that can create realistic images from a description in natural language, to show what an apocalypse would look like if it ever were to happen.

AI has predicted what an apocalypse could look like after the Doomsday Clock was reset on Tuesday (Dall.E 2)

Open AI, which created the artificial intelligence system, said: "It receives both the text and the image as a single stream of data containing up to 1280 tokens and is trained using maximum likelihood to generate all of the tokens, one after another.

"This training procedure allows DALL·E to not only generate an image from scratch but also to regenerate any rectangular region of an existing image that extends to the bottom-right corner, in a way that is consistent with the text prompt."

Using the keyword prompt of "apocalypse this year", DALL·E 2 showed a variety of concepts of the disaster which mainly showed deserted cities being destroyed and ominous skies above.

Nearly all the images showed deserted cities which had been destroyed and ominous skies (Dall.E 2)

The Bulletin’s science and security board decides the clock’s setting and its chief executive Rachel Bronson said to the Washington Post: "What we’ve been looking at is the unravelling of the international order… when two countries that control the largest nuclear arsenals in the world are at odds.

"And what we’re trying to say [is] that we really need to find a way to contain this crisis."

However, she did assure people that they don’t anticipate it ever being able to set it at midnight because at that point "we won’t have any tools left to respond".

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